In Search of Pretty Young Black Men Read online

  “Nothing beats good head.”

  “Truly.”

  “I am sooooo high.”

  “Truly.”

  “Speaking of coffee.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maggie?”

  “You know she needs it.”

  “You know that’s right.”

  “Look at her. She looks so peaceful all curled up there.”

  “Bullshit. She looks like she’s having a wet dream.”

  “Oh please, Elaine, little boys have wet dreams.”

  “Oh please yourself. I had them all the time as a blossoming teen. I guess I should’ve considered myself blessed but you know how teenagers are, don’t miss it till it’s gone. I used to be able to cum just like that, in a snap. Thank God Cameron came along, with his good head-giving self. And twenty-seven-year-old Regis is not bad either. I mean, he’s no Cameron, but his young tongue knows its way around the pink hole, much thanks to my diligent tutelage, which I’m sure the little son-of-a-bitch is using on some of these other old divas of the Hills. But I just can’t help myself. I like the young ones. I married Cameron when he was young. Right out of his teens. Yes. Just call me Robin Hood. I rob the cradle to feed the old.”

  Maggie, who had remained silent and distant throughout was truly not one to taunt, not at this moment, not while she half slept, half listened and fully kept caught up in the web of a pretty young black man who made her day one lovely afternoon almost a year ago. She could not put it into words but was glad Elaine could express her matching sentiments so eloquently and right on target.

  Nothing like them. Nothing. No. Not a thing.

  Not when they’re young and sweet and adventurous, and so eager to please, when they still have dreams to reach for and kingdoms to conquer instead of lying back inattentive to the passion because privilege, position, and prosperity cushion their fall toward life and the pursuit of living. She needed a Dorian in her life. She needed him like a cool drink and a kind word. Like a swing out on a veranda. Like Doctor Feelgood. She needed him, and was grateful to have had a taste of him, a taste of his young self, the lingering aftertaste of too sweet Kool-Aid and too sweet boy.

  Needed him. Needed his perfection. His perfect self.

  “Make love to me? Not just sex?”

  “Don’t worry, lovely Margaret Arial Lester-Allegro. I come with a money-back guarantee.”

  And she knew he meant it. And she knew that he was going to be worth every penny of his thousand dollar fee.

  “Shall I pay you now…” she almost begged, “…or after?”

  “That’s not important,” he said so simply, so tenderly. “Anytime is fine. Before. After. Anytime you want.”

  And she could now only look at him with a monumental gratitude, and she fought hard to hold back the tears of joy.

  “Anytime I want,” she could hear herself saying with a newfound calm. “You don’t know what that means to me. Anytime I want. My wants. Oh God…I’m so ready to be loved right now. And here you are. Ready to venture where no man dared to go. Yes. I think I’ll pay you now.”

  Chapter Seven

  The discovery of the dead blonde—her name was Mercy Randolph—on the Lester-Allegros’ doorstep was truth stranger than fiction. The story, in its various interpretations, strode scandalously through Baldwin Hills, inciting praise, condemnation, and much finger snapping.

  Blue-haired dowagers huddled in back pews, “girled” each other in nail salons, and conference-called their Eastern Star cronies all up and down the coast while feigning deep sympathy for the terribly wronged Mrs. Lester-Allegro. And such a pretty thing for her age.

  When the truth behind the melodrama was revealed, the celebrity of the tale took on new proportion and endured full strength for several months.

  Maggie was in the pool when she heard the shot. It was a hot day—muggier than Southern California had a right to be—and the Santa Anas were feverish. Maggie desperately needed a dip.

  Elois Andrews across the street must have been the first to see the dead white woman, or if not, was at least the first to scream. Leisured down by margaritas, Maggie slipped out of the pool and very slowly headed for the house. The whole neighborhood had converged outside the low shrubbery that walled her lavish property before she even noticed.

  She swung wide her front door and while her neighbors oohed and ahhed with proper black upper-middle-class reserve, she knew that they all knew what she now knew.

  Francine Harvey from next door truly did not have to take the note from the dead woman’s cleavage; after all, she didn’t die on her doorstep. But she did, she did take the note. And Yula Tyson didn’t have to take the note from Francine and read it out loud, but she did. Miss Yula Tyson was that kind of woman.

  Lamont,

  It’s been more than three years. I can’t share you anymore. I’m leaving you the only way I know how.

  Mercy

  Needless to say Mrs. Maggie Arial Lester-Allegro was outdone. Here was some blond bitch with half her brains splattered all over her front steps and a written record of her husband’s Zsa Zsaesque infidelities, on top of wretched Santa Ana winds. How could anyone blame her if she seemed to be going a little crazy?

  Arleta didn’t blame her. Lydia didn’t blame her. Elaine didn’t blame her. They all sort of…understood. Besides, it was so long ago and Maggie seemed to be all right now, and Lamont had truly made great strides in bringing some civility, if not sex and sympathy, to a relationship and a marriage laid in a ditch and left for dead.

  But fuck all that. What is that anyway? What does any of it have to do with anything anyway? What’s wrong with a little break-away bullshit and a little bid whist with the girls and a little reminiscing about a good time with a young boy? Even if such remembrances stayed in the head, stayed in the heart, kept a safe distance from the uglier and unspeakable outcome?

  You get what you pay for. That she truly knew. And if that was what he cost than that was what she paid. A small price indeed. And besides, he came with a money-back guarantee. What more could a woman in her state of mind want or need?

  So then where did the madness come from?

  How could she have gone off and done what she had done, or had thought she’d done? She had gone stark-raving mad somehow. She thought she knew what it was. She thought it was a loud kind of madness heard ’round the world, a madness going down for the third time, flailing arms and chopped-up pieces of desperate silent screams, piercing even as they die in gulps. She thought it was the kind of madness only someone like herself could have conjured up with such deadly, painful accuracy.

  No. Grand is not always easy!

  Chapter Eight

  Albee Mention—whose given name was Ralph Chesterfield, a name abandoned during the 1960s renaissance for the moniker Ali Muhammad, which he later surrendered, when Disco lobotomized the movement in the mid-1970s, for Albee Mention (he was and always had been a closet fan of Edward Albee)—was a serious writer of blaxploitation.

  His books, whose covers were inspired by velvet paintings of earthy lovemaking dramatized by black lighting, were prominently displayed between the Harlequin romances and the collected works of Iceberg Slim at every Kmart in every black and fashionably liberal Jewish neighborhood across the country.

  Turning out five to ten titles a year, he raked in the money and, wearing his wealth like too much cologne, did often look like a fur-collared pimp from the 1970s. He was often stopped by Glendale police who were first alerted by the color of his skin, which caused them to take particular note of the heavily detailed metallic Rolls, and then felt confirmed in their Aryan suspicions upon closer inspection of the caricature behind the wheel.

  Most of the cotillion elite of Baldwin Hills, on the other hand, tried to ignore the existence of their dubiously monied neighbor who was also housed on the back shelves of Kahlila’s Book Emporium next door to Marla Gibbs’ theater and across the street from Leimert Park. That is, the books were hou
sed there, not the author, who lived palatially at the summit that was Angeles Vista Boulevard and Don Carlos Drive, across the street from Doctor and Mrs. Lamont Lester-Allegro.

  Albee Mention and Lamont Lester-Allegro were the very best of friends and no one could really figure out why.

  They had often crossed paths with no more than cordial nods across Don Carlos Drive—the Lester-Allegros on the even side of the street, the Mentions on the odd—on those days when “true” members of the clubhouse and monied wannabes had no choice but to cross each other’s paths: the early morning routine of putting out the cans on garbage day when the housekeeper was off; the occasional earthquake strong enough to make both the conspicuously grand and the quiet elite run out whooping in the streets like the sanctified caught up in thinking that this one was the BIG one; and watering one’s own lawn on those days when the gardener thought the sun was too hot for anything but the beach. Yes, they had crossed paths with cordial nods, but they had not really spoken. Not until Glendale. There was no need to before then.

  “Brothaman,” Albee would chime in a smooth baritone that did not seem to fit him. That’s how he always referred to Lamont—Brothaman, and he, all six feet four inches of him, was known to bury the smaller man—Lamont stood at a lean and even six feet, a hundred and seventy-something tight cut pounds—in a roughhouse bear hug whenever they met, which was often.

  They hung out like schoolboys playing hooky, which sometimes caused the more traditional Lamont to flinch with guilt and sneakiness. Albee Mention, on the other hand, did not suffer such fantasies of career self-flagellation, for although he was astonishingly prolific, he was self-described as “lazy as fuck.” He simply did not subscribe to the notion of suffering for the art and only wrote when he truly felt like it. Even then, he only wrote in small spurts—a paragraph here, twenty minutes there. But somehow books got written, published, and bought. Therefore no reason existed to discourage his leisurely ways.

  Lamont Lester-Allegro and Albee Mention. They were really quite a unique pair, these two. They were successful black men who seemed to have it all, had learned the game and played it well, and had all the trinkets and trappings to prove it—the right kind of houses in the right kind of neighborhood with the right kind of wives.

  Vera Mention was an as-white-as-you-can-get home girl from Breedlow, Texas. Albee had picked her up during a weekend in Vegas. He had mistakenly accused her of picking his pocket after she fucked him sore at Caesars. After his Epsom salt bath that night he took her to an expensive dinner as a show of apology, then married her six weeks later.

  Vera Mention and Maggie Arial Lester-Allegro did not hang out, no, not at all. As far as Maggie was concerned there was already one too many Great White Hopes, too many young Zsa Zsa’s within shot of her husband’s nine inches. She knew what they were and she knew what they stood for. No matter what shape they were in. Old or tired or broken or fat or whorish or cheap or all of the above. They were still “in.” They were always “in.” They were still aspirations. They were still goals. They were still high-water marks for some, acts of vengeance for others, and a pounding on the chest, a grabbing of the balls, and a screaming from the lungs “I am a man!” for still far too many. Still, in these so-called progressive 1980s.

  So it was strange—or maybe not so strange at all—that the denouement which brought onstage all the principal players—Maggie, Elaine, Dorian, Lamont, Albee, Vera, and Mercy—would be played out with so much blood and madness and melodrama.

  But it all went back to Glendale, and years earlier, back to Breedlow, that lower Texas pass-through for itinerants headed for California’s mostly mythic, rarely realized, celluloid gold.

  Herb Rooney and his wife, Della, were the proud white trash pillars of Breedlow, Texas. But soon the lure of Hollywood was too much to resist. They pulled up stakes, packed up their daughters, and made the move. Herb landed a security guard job at 20th Century–Fox while Della became a union extra who got plenty of work through Central Casting and Universal Studios.

  Herb was also a staunch supporter of the “protectionist” school and was not about to see his beautiful blond, blue-eyed daughters, Vera and Mercy, become “nigger fodder.” He often preached the gospel of racial purity and thought he had reared them in the correct and righteous ways of his ancestors with incredible tales of the black man’s evil. But that only served to intrigue his young, juicy, bouncing, blond babies much like the fruit on the Lord’s Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil tempted. It was all in the last name: Evil.

  When Vera and Mercy would overhear their father’s tales of how Grandpappy used to cut off the fat dicks of pretty young black men after they were lynched, the girls wanted to know why the fat dicks of pretty young black men had to be cut off. What was so fearful or loathsome or nasty about them? What was so wonderful about them?

  It was this question that initiated the search.

  Chapter Nine

  “Slap me again and I’ll chew your mothafuckin’ knuckles off, you black motherfucker!” Mercy screamed at Joe Jay Randolph. Furiously, she picked herself up off the floor and brushed away the disheveled blond hair that now covered her face like snarled, dull Christmas tinsel. Then she wiped at the mascara-stained tears that streamed down her red-bruised cheek and got right up in Joe Jay Randolph’s face again. So Joe Jay Randolph slapped her again just to see if she would chew his mothafuckin’ knuckles off.

  “BITCH!” he yelled, like she had hit him. And then she kept her word. She snagged his hand in her mouth and bit down with everything she had. The pain sent a bolt right down his spine and between his legs his balls tightened like frozen prunes.

  He was howling now, howling like a dog on fire. He danced around the room with his vicious wife dead tight on his bleeding hand. He knocked at her and knocked at her and knocked at her, and kept on howling and dancing her around. But the grip never loosened. He then danced her over to the window and threw her through the glass. Blood was everywhere: her blood, his blood. So she bit deeper, and now he was crying and wailing so bad that he never even heard the police break down the door.

  They beat the shit out of him. Literally. They beat him so bad that he shitted all over himself. And as batons slammed on every part of him—his back, his stomach, his kneecaps, and rib cage, on his head, in his face—he almost wanted to laugh, laugh at the weird sound of cracking bones and squishy blood-letting.

  When he woke up he was in a hospital bed and a man with a thin grin was looming over him.

  “Joe Jay, welcome back,” the man said, his breath bad enough to cut through the smell of medicine and rubbing alcohol. “I’m Frank, your lawyer.”

  The story of the Joe Jay Randolph beating, videotaped through the motel’s snoop and security system, hit the evening news on all four networks and stayed front page for the full two weeks Joe Jay lay unconscious.

  The city was in an uproar and the mayor had a plan. After all, this was still Hollywood.

  From sea to shining sea the country held its breath and, while still bloated up, prayed diligently for that poor black man beaten up by L.A.’s finest.

  Four police officers, three councilmen, two commissioners, one police chief, and 8.5 million dollars later, Joe Jay Randolph was back on his feet and feeling good as new.

  Even things between him and his wife, Mercy, were a lot better. (Who says money can’t buy you love?) She nursed him and babied him like she used to do in the beginning, when she called herself over with being this trashy little white girl from Breedlow, Texas, who once sucked some man’s dick because he made her believe that he was Wesley Snipes.

  Joe Jay was really her kind of pretty young black man: old enough to know better and young enough to not give a damn. He was a dick and a fist, now a rich dick and a fist. And Mercy took it as long as she could. She loved getting fucked and fucked up by him—until one day when she remembered the privilege she bore by the tint of her skin.

  If there was nothing else, there was one thing she
learned from her father. She was a white woman in a white world. And although she had miles to go to reach a white man’s status, she was still his prize, his cause, and, cocooned in the preciousness of her gilded and fanciful cage, miles above the black men she so desperately craved.

  But there was sweet danger in the dark. It was in the dark that desires were fulfilled: pussies were licked good and fucked sore, and titty nipples were nibbled and pinched with the pleasures of pain.

  Just the very thought of the danger in the dark would make her cum, just like the thought of the danger in the dark had put the fear of God in the “goodest” of good white Christians and pink-back, flat-bottom white boys who fucked with a purpose but not with a passion.

  But now the danger in the dark that lived within Joe Jay was now becoming a one-trick pony. The fucking and the fucking up, the dick-then-the-fist was becoming a mundane routine. And like the good white woman that she knew she was, she knew that it would be easy to move out and move on and still find the darkness that sought out the light.

  Her brother-in-law, Albee, knew what she wanted, but when asked by her, now a cash-rich divorcée in search of some struggling young black man, to make the hookup, she was more than surprised and somewhat disappointed to be introduced to this bourgeois doctor who was whiter than she.

  True, he was dark as the blue-black abyss, but he carried himself like a dickless white man, straight up and swaggerless. Yes, where was that swagger which was supported by bowlegs made bowed by the sway and the weight of thick, jizzum-filled sausage?

  It was at the Cave, a polished-up pickup joint in the Glendale Galleria, where Albee Mention, hanging in a club that tried to discourage his presence with the sudden loud strains of country-and-western music the moment he entered, and where he wore his wife, Vera, on his arm and then flashed her so sweetly in their faces, that he introduced Mercy, the white girl du jour, to Doctor Lamont Lester-Allegro.